Not So Super Ads

This is the first time in years where the actual football game, the reason for the Super Bowl, steadily outperformed that of the TV commercials.

What is supposed to be a high peak for marketeers everywhere fell flat on its face in this year’s roster of ads, with agencies and clients taking few, if any, real chances and offering us the same old boring work we can pretty much see the rest of the year.

Sure, there were a couple of exceptions — the Tide media blitz was clever, and Jeff Bezos’s Alexa losing her voice was funny — but overall, it seemed as if Madison Avenue had decided to phone it all in this year.

Perhaps after a year of constant presidential Tweeting and daily new churn about Russia investigations and ill-fated memos, the agencies were just too tired to do much else.

Then again, it was a huge missed opportunity, to make something of this moment, perhaps to even acknowledge in a celebrated manner that the grand moment of TV advertising has probably had its place in the sun and is ebbing into the twilight of marketing history, replaced by data- (and lest we forget, bot-) driven marketing, with creativity taking a back seat to results.

We are firmly ensconced in a performance-driven economy, and marketers are going to increasingly demand performance-driven results.